Several U.S. tech
giants including Google, Microsoft and Intel Corporation have filled top
positions with former members of Israeli military intelligence and are heavily
investing in their Israeli branches while laying off thousands of American
employees, all while receiving millions of dollars in U.S. government subsidies
funded by American taxpayers.
WASHINGTON — With nearly 6 million Americans unemployed and
regular bouts of layoffs in the U.S. tech industry, major American tech
companies like Google, Microsoft and Intel Corporation are nonetheless moving
key operations, billions in investments, and thousands of jobs to Israel — a
trend that has largely escaped media attention or concern from even “America
first” politicians. The fact that this massive transfer of investment and jobs
has been so overlooked is particularly striking given that it is largely the
work of a single leading neoconservative Republican donor who has given
millions of dollars to President Donald Trump.
To make matters worse, many of these top tech companies
shifting investment and jobs to Israel at record rates continue to collect
sizable U.S. government subsidies for their operations while they move critical
aspects of their business abroad, continue to layoff thousands of American
workers, and struggle to house their growing company branches in Israel. This
is particularly troubling in light of the importance of the tech sector to the
overall U.S. economy, as it accounts for 7.1 percent of total GDP and 11.6
percent of total private-sector payroll.
Furthermore, many of these companies are hiring members of
controversial Israeli companies — known to have spied on Americans, American
companies, and U.S. federal agencies — as well as numerous members of Israeli
military intelligence as top managers and executives.
This massive transfer of the American tech industry has
largely been the work of one leading Republican donor — billionaire hedge fund
manager Paul Singer, who also funds the neoconservative think tank American
Enterprise Institute (AEI), the Islamophobic and hawkish think tank Foundation
for Defense of Democracies (FDD), the Republican Jewish Coalition (RJC), and
also funded the now-defunct Foreign Policy Initiative (FPI).
Singer’s project to bolster Israel’s tech economy at the
U.S.’ expense is known as Start-Up Nation Central, which he founded in response
to the global Boycott, Divest and Sanctions (BDS) movement that seeks to use
nonviolent means to pressure Israel to comply with international law in
relation to its treatment of Palestinians.
This project is directly linked to Israeli Prime Minister
Benjamin Netanyahu, who in recent years has publicly mentioned that it has been
his “deliberate policy” to have former members of Israel’s “military and
intelligence units … merge into companies with local partners and foreign
partners” in order to make it all but impossible for major corporations and
foreign governments to boycott Israel.
In this report, MintPress identifies dozens of former members
of an elite Israeli military intelligence unit who now hold top positions at
Microsoft, Google and Facebook.
Singer’s nonprofit organization has acted as the vehicle
through which Netanyahu’s policy has been realized, via the group’s close
connections to the Israeli PM and Singer’s long-time support for Netanyahu and
the Likud Party. With deep ties to Netanyahu, the American Israel Public
Affairs Committee (AIPAC), and controversial tech companies — like Amdocs —
that spied on the American government, this Singer-funded organization has
formed a nexus of connections between the public and private sectors of both
the American and Israeli economies with the single goal of making Israel the
new technology superpower, largely at the expense of the American economy and
government, which currently gives $3.2 billion in aid to Israel annually.
Researched and developed in Israel
In recent years, the top U.S. tech companies have been
shifting many of their most critical operations, particularly research and
development, to one country: Israel. A 2016 report in Business Insider noted
that Google, Facebook, Microsoft, Amazon and Apple had all opened up research
and development (R&D) centers in recent years, with some of them having as
many as three such centers in Israel, a country roughly the size of New Jersey.
Other major tech companies that have also opened key operation and research
centers in Israel include Sandisk, Nvidia, PayPal, Palantir and Dell. Forbes
noted last year that the world’s top 10 tech companies were now “doing
mission-critical work in Israel that’s core to their businesses back at HQ.”
Yet, some of these tech giants, particularly those based in
the U.S., are heavily investing in their Israeli branches while laying off
thousands of American employees, all while receiving millions of dollars in
U.S. government subsidies funded by American taxpayers.
For example, Intel Corporation, which is the world’s second
largest manufacturer of semiconductor computer chips and is headquartered in
California, has long been a major employer in Israel, with over 10,000
employees in the Jewish state. However, earlier this year, Intel announced that
it would be investing $11 billion in a new factory in Israel and would receive
around $1 billion in an Israeli government grant for that investment. Just a
matter of months after Intel announced its major new investment in Israel, it
announced a new round of layoffs in the United States.
Yet this is just one recent example of what has become a
trend for Intel. In 2018, Intel made public its plan to invest $5 billion in
one of its Israeli factories and had invested an additional $15 billion in
Israeli-created autonomous driving technology a year prior, creating thousands
of Intel jobs in Israel. Notably, over that same time frame, Intel has cut
nearly 12,000 jobs in the United States. While this great transfer of
investment and jobs was undermining the U.S. economy and hurting American
workers, particularly in the tech sector, Intel received over $25 million
dollars in subsidies from the U.S. federal government.
A similar phenomenon has been occurring at another
U.S.-based tech giant, Microsoft. Beginning in 2014 and continuing into 2018,
Microsoft has laid off well over 20,000 employees, most of them Americans, in
several different rounds of staff cuts. Over that same time period, Microsoft
has been on a hiring spree in Israel, building new campuses and investing
billions of dollars annually in its Israel-based research and development
center and in other Israeli start-up companies, creating thousands of jobs
abroad. In addition, Microsoft has been pumping millions of dollars into
technology programs at Israeli universities and institutes, such as the
Technion Institute. Over this same time frame, Microsoft has received nearly
$197 million in subsidies from the state governments of Washington, Iowa and
Virginia.
Though Israeli politicians and tech company executives have
praised this dramatic shift as the result of Israel’s tech prowess and growing
reputation as a technological innovation hub, much of this dramatic shift has
been the work of the Netanyahu-tied Singer’s effort to counter a global
movement aimed at boycotting Israel and to make Israel a global “cyber power.”
Start-Up Nation Central and the Neocons
Paul Singer | AP photo archive
In 2009, a book titled Start Up Nation: The Story of
Israel’s Economic Miracle, written by American neoconservative Dan Senor and
Jerusalem Post journalist Saul Singer (unrelated to Paul), quickly rose to the
New York Times bestseller list for its depiction of Israel as the tech start-up
capital of the world. The book — published by the Council on Foreign Relations,
where Senor was then serving as Adjunct Senior Fellow — asserts that Israel’s
success in producing so many start-up companies resulted from the combination
of its liberal immigration laws and its “leverage of the business talents of
young people with military experience.”
“The West needs innovation; Israel’s got it,” wrote Senor
and Singer. In a post-publication interview with the blog Freakonomics, Senor
asserted that service in the Israeli military was crucial to Israel’s tech
sector success, stating that:
“Certain units have become technology boot camps, where 18-
to 22-year-olds get thrown projects and missions that would make the heads spin
of their counterparts in universities or the private sector anywhere else in
the world. The Israelis come out of the military not just with hands-on
exposure to next-gen technology, but with training in teamwork, mission
orientation, leadership, and a desire to continue serving their country by
contributing to its tech sector — a source of pride for just about every
Israeli.”
The book, in addition to the many accolades it received from
the mainstream press, left a lasting impact on top Republican donor Paul
Singer, known for funding the most influential neoconservative think tanks in
America, as noted above. Paul Singer was so inspired by Senor and Singer’s book
that he decided to spend $20 million to fund and create an organization with a
similar name. He created the Start-Up Nation Central (SUNC) just three years
after the book’s release in 2012.
To achieve his vision, Singer – who is also a top donor to
the Republican Party and Trump – tapped Israeli economist Eugene Kandel, who
served as Netanyahu’s national economic adviser and chaired the Israeli
National Economic Council from 2009 to 2015.
Senor was likely directly involved in the creation of SUNC,
as he was then employed by Paul Singer and, with neoconservatives Bill Kristol
and Robert Kagan, co-founded the FPI, which Singer had long funded before it
closed in 2017. In addition, Dan Senor’s sister, Wendy Singer (unrelated to
either Paul or Saul), long-time director of Israel’s AIPAC office, became the
organization’s executive director.
SUNC’s management team, in addition to Eugene Kandel and
Wendy Singer, includes Guy Hilton as the organization’s general manager. Hilton
is a long-time marketing executive at Israeli telecommunications company
Amdocs, where he “transformed” the company’s marketing organization. Amdocs was
once highly controversial in the United States after it was revealed by a 2001
Fox News investigation that numerous federal agencies had investigated the
company, which then had contracts with the 25 largest telephone companies in
the country, for its alleged role in an aggressive espionage operation that
targeted the U.S. government. Hilton worked at Microsoft prior to joining
Amdocs.
Beyond the management team, SUNC’s board of directors
includes Paul Singer, Dan Senor and Terry Kassel — who work for Singer at his
hedge fund, Elliott Management — and Rapheal Ouzan. Ouzan was an officer in the
elite foreign military intelligence unit of Israel, Unit 8200, who co-founded
BillGuard the day after he left that unit, which is often compared to the U.S.’
National Security Agency (NSA). Within five months of its founding, BillGuard
was backed by funding from PayPal founder Peter Thiel and former CEO of Google,
Eric Schmidt. Ouzan is also connected to U.S. tech companies that have greatly
expanded their Israeli branches since SUNC’s founding — such as Microsoft,
Google, PayPal and Intel, all of which support Ouzan’s non-profit Israel Tech
Challenge.
According to reports from the time published in Haaretz and
Bloomberg, SUNC was explicitly founded to serve as “a foreign ministry for
Israel’s tech industry” and “to strength Israel’s economy” while also aiming to
counter the Boycott, Divest and Sanctions (BDS) movement that seeks to use a
nonviolent boycott to end the illegal military occupation of the West Bank and
Israeli apartheid, as well as the growth of illegal Jewish-only settlements in
occupied Palestinian territory.
Since its founding, SUNC has sought to transfer tech jobs
from foreign companies to Israel by developing connections and influence with
foreign governments and companies so that they “deepen their relationship with
Israel’s tech industry.” Though SUNC has since expanded to include other
sectors of the Israeli “start-up” economy, its focus has long remained on
Israel’s tech, specifically its cybersecurity industry. Foreign investment in
this single Israeli industry has grown from $227 million in 2014 to $815
million in 2018.
In addition to its own activities, SUNC appears to be
closely linked to a similar organization, sponsored by Coca Cola and Daimler
Mercedes Benz, called The Bridge, which also seeks to connect Israeli start-up
companies with large international corporations. Indeed, SUNC, according to its
website, was actually responsible for Daimler Mercedes Benz’s decision to join
The Bridge, thanks to a delegation from the company that SUNC hosted in Israel
and the connections made during that visit.
Teaming up with Israel’s Unit 8200
Unit 8200 | Israel
Members of Israel’s signals intelligence Unit 8200 work
under a Saudi flag. Photo | Moti Milrod
Notably, SUNC has deep ties to Israel’s military
intelligence unit known as Unit 8200 and, true to Start Up Nation’s praise of
IDF service as key to Israel’s success, has been instrumental in connecting
Unit 8200 alumni with key roles in foreign companies, particularly American
tech companies. For instance, Maty Zwaig, a former lieutenant colonel in Unit 8200,
is SUNC’s current director of human capital programs, and SUNC’s current
manager of strategic programs, Tamar Weiss, is also a former member of the
unit.
One particularly glaring connection between SUNC and Unit
8200 can be seen in Inbal Arieli, who served as SUNC’s Vice President of
Strategic Partnerships from 2014 to 2017 and continues to serve as a senior
adviser to the organization. Arieli, a former lieutenant in Unit 8200, is the
founder and head of the 8200 Entrepreneurship and Innovation Support Program
(EISP), which was the first start-up accelerator in Israel aimed at harnessing
“the vast network and entrepreneurial DNA of [Unit] 8200 alumni” and is
currently one of the top company accelerators in Israel. Arieli was the top
executive at 8200 EISP while working at SUNC.
Another key connection between SUNC and Unit 8200 is SUNC’s
promotion of Team8, a company-creation platform whose CEO and co-founder is
Nadav Zafrir, former commander of Unit 8200. In addition to prominently
featuring Team8 and Zafrir on the cybersecurity section of its website, SUNC
also sponsored a talk by Zafrir and an Israeli government economist at the
World Economic Forum, often referred to as “Davos,” that was attended
personally by Paul Singer.
Team8’s investors include Google’s Eric Schmidt, Microsoft,
and Walmart — and it recently hired former head of the NSA and U.S. Cyber
Command, retired Admiral Mike Rogers. Team8 described the decision to hire
Rogers as being “instrumental in helping strategize” Team8’s expansion in the
United States. However, Jake Williams, a veteran of NSA’s Tailored Access
Operations hacking unit, told CyberScoop:
“Rogers is not being brought into this role because of his
technical experience. …It’s purely because of his knowledge of classified operations
and his ability to influence many in the U.S. government and private-sector
contractors.”
In addition to connections to Unit 8200-linked groups like
Team8 and 8200 EISP, SUNC also directly collaborates with the IDF in an
initiative aimed at preparing young Israeli women to serve in Unit 8200. That
initiative, called the CyberGirlz Club, is jointly funded by Israel’s Defense
Ministry, SUNC and the Rashi Foundation, the philanthropic organization set up
by the Leven family of Perrier-brand water, which has close ties to the Israeli
government and IDF.
“Our aim is to bring the girls to this process already
skilled, with the knowledge needed to pass the exams for Unit 8200 and serve in
the military as programmers,” Zwaig told Israel National News.
Seeding American tech
The connections between SUNC and Unit 8200 are troubling for
more than a few reasons, one of which being that Unit 8200, often likened to
the U.S.’ NSA, closely coordinates with Israel’s intelligence agency, the
Mossad, and is responsible for 90 percent of the intelligence material obtained
by the Israeli government, according to its former commander Yair Cohen. Cohen
told Forbes in 2016, that “there isn’t a major operation, from the Mossad or
any intelligence security agency, that 8200 is not involved in.” For obvious
reasons, the fact that an organization founded by an American billionaire is
actively promoting the presence of former military intelligence officers in
foreign companies, specifically American companies, while also promoting the
transfer of jobs and investment to that same country, is very troubling indeed.
Particularly troubling is the fact that, since SUNC’s
founding, the number of former Unit 8200 members in top positions in American
tech companies has skyrocketed. Based on a non-exhaustive analysis conducted by
Mintpress of over 200 LinkedIn accounts of former Israeli military intelligence
and intelligence officers in three major tech companies, numerous former Unit
8200 alumni were found to currently hold top managerial or executive positions
in Microsoft, Google and Facebook.
At Microsoft, managers for at least 15 of the company’s
products and programs — including Microsoft’s lead managers for engineering,
product strategy, threat analytics and cloud business intelligence — publicly
listed their affiliation with Unit 8200 on their LinkedIn accounts. In addition,
the general manager of Microsoft’s Israeli Research and Development Center is
also a former member of Unit 8200. In total, of the 200 accounts analyzed, 50
of them currently worked for Microsoft.
Similarly, at Google, 28 former Unit 8200 members at the
company were identified from their LinkedIn accounts. Among them are Google’s
Engineering Director, its strategic partner manager, two growth marketing
leads, its lead technical manager, and six product and program managers,
including Google’s manager for trust and safety search.
Facebook also has several Unit 8200 members in prominent
positions, though fewer than Google and Microsoft. MintPress identified at
least 13 Unit 8200 alumni working for Facebook, including its director of
engineering, lead manager for express wi-fi, and technical program manager.
Notably, Facebook has spent the last several years collaborating with Israel’s
government to censor Israel’s critics.
Of course, there is likely much more influence of Unit 8200
on these companies than this non-exhaustive analysis revealed, given that many
of these companies acquired several Israeli start-ups run by and staffed by
many Unit 8200 alumni who subsequently went on to found new companies and
start-ups a few years or shortly after acquisition. Furthermore, due to the
limitations of LinkedIn’s set-up, MintPress was not able to access the complete
list of Unit 8200 alumni at these three tech companies, meaning that the
eye-opening numbers found were generated by a relatively small sample.
This jump in Unit 8200 members in top positions in tech
companies of global importance is actually a policy long promoted by Netanyahu,
whose long-time economic adviser is the chief executive at SUNC. During an
interview with Fox News last year, Netanyahu was asked by Fox News host Mark
Levin if the large growth seen in recent years in Israel’s technology sector
was part of Netanyahu’s plan. Netanyahu responded, “That’s very much my plan …
It’s a very deliberate policy.” He later added that “Israel had technology
because the military, especially military intelligence, produced a lot of
capabilities. These incredibly gifted young men and women who come out of the
military or the Mossad, they want to start their start-ups.”
Netanyahu further outlined this policy at the 2019 Cybertech
conference in Tel Aviv, where he stated that Israel’s emergence as one of the
top five “cyber powers” had “required allowing this combination of military
intelligence, academia and industry to converge in one place” and that this further
required allowing “our graduates of our military and intelligence units to
merge into companies with local partners and foreign partners.” The direct
tie-ins of SUNC to Netanyahu and the fact that Paul Singer has also been a
long-time political donor and backer of Netanyahu suggest that SUNC is a key
part of Netanyahu’s policy of placing former military intelligence and
intelligence operatives in strategic positions in major technology companies.
Notably, just as SUNC was founded to counter the BDS
movement, Netanyahu has asserted that this policy of ensuring Israel’s role as
a “cyber power” is aimed at increasing its diplomatic power and specifically
undermining BDS as well as the United Nations, which has repeatedly condemned
Israel’s government for war crimes and violations of international law in
relation to the Palestinians.
Building the bi-national surveillance state
NSA Yahoo-Google
A Google data center in Hamina, Finland. Google via AP
Top U.S. tech companies have filled top positions with
former members of Israeli military intelligence and moved strategic and
critical operations to Israel, boosting Israel’s economy at the expense of
America’s, and SUNC’s role in this marked shift merits scrutiny.
A powerful American billionaire has built an influential
organization with deep connections to the U.S.-Israel lobby (AIPAC), an Israeli
company that has been repeatedly investigated for spying on the U.S. government
(Amdocs), and the elite Israeli military intelligence unit (Unit 8200) that has
used its influential connections to the U.S. government and the U.S. private
sector to dramatically shift the operations and make-up of major companies in a
critical sector of the U.S. economy.
Further consider that U.S. government documents leaked by
Edward Snowden have flagged Israel as “leading threat” to the infrastructure of
U.S. financial and banking institutions, which use much of the software
produced by these top tech companies, and have also flagged Israel as a top
espionage threat. One U.S. government document cited Israel as the third most
aggressive intelligence service against the U.S. behind Russia and China. Thus,
Paul Singer’s pet project in Start-Up Nation Central has undermined not only
the U.S. economy but arguably U.S. national security as well.
This concern is further exacerbated by the deep ties
connecting top tech companies like Microsoft and Google to the U.S. military.
Microsoft and Google are both key military contractors — Microsoft in
particular, given that it is set to win a lucrative contract for the Pentagon’s
cloud management and has partnered with the Department of Defense to produce a
“secure” election system known as ElectionGuard that is set to be implemented
in some U.S. states for the 2020 general election.
Top Photo: Paul Singer | AP photo archive
Whitney Webb is a MintPress News journalist based in Chile.
She has contributed to several independent media outlets including Global
Research, EcoWatch, the Ron Paul Institute and 21st Century Wire, among others.
She has made several radio and television appearances and is the 2019 winner of
the Serena Shim Award for Uncompromised Integrity in Journalism.